Lone Star Ruby Conf 2008: Care and Feeding of Ruby Developers

For folks who want to understand the rare ‘Ruby Developer’ creature and their native habitat, the Ruby community, there are some important qualities to recognize and understand. The ‘Ruby Developer’ is an interesting creature – similar enough to other developers to fool some at first glance, with some important differences to be considered.

At FiveRuns, we assembled a completely new team, rewrote and launched a new version of a successful product, juggled many parallel projects & sub-projects, successfully navigated which parts to do in-house, which parts to contract out, and when to do them – with no fatalities. While there are certainly plenty of examples of similarly successful projects, what made the difference was the special qualities that come with Ruby Developers and the Ruby community.

Some of these qualities include:

ease of collaborative and distributed development – ad-hoc, informal collaborations (both in the team and with the larger community)

living on the edge – the desire, need and ability to work with bleeding edge technologies as part of moving the work forward

strong aesthetic – not just in the code, but pervasively, e.g. visually in a product, their physical environment, etc

For this talk, we will explore these and other qualities, their pros & cons and some specific suggestions about their creative and respectful use.

Steve Sanderson – VP of Development & Technology, FiveRunsSteve is a maker of software products, with over twenty-eight years in software development. Starting with hacks in the UNIX kernel and winding his way up through the stack, he has made stops along the way to build community web products for excite.com, play with Smalltalk, and fall in love with various technologies and ideas. With an emphasis on products that are simple and elegant, he blends his passions for solving problems in software, creating something of true value and working with bright and creative people to lead those product development efforts. Read Steve’s blog at http://stevesanderson.com.